Photo credit: Fernando Quevedo
Rewilding is a timely, systemic and fundamental approach. To understand its relevance it is worthwhile to understand the context within which rewilding takes place and to not ignore the key driver behind many problems that we face.
50 years old and unfortunately more valid than ever: Limits to Growth.
It is characteristic of the turning point humanity has reached that many writers and intellectuals look back into and search the origins of modern civilization. How did it start and how and why did we arrive at the point we currently are? What needs to change and how can change happen? Where will our predicament lead to if we do not change our ways?
It is evident that humanity needs a fundamental change and radical paradigm shift.
This is not the first time that humans are challenged in redefining their place in the world, be it the universe or the Earth. In fact, over the last 500 years, humanity has experienced several eye-opening moments that entirely changed its world view:
In the 16th century, Nikolaus Copernicus proved that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. We suddenly were not anymore the center of the universe, but just a single planet in a wider solar system in a vast universe.
With the publication of his book Systema naturae in 1735, Linnaeus launched his seven layers of kinship that all Earth’s life-forms shared with one another (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus & Species). Humans were also given a place in the system like all the others (order Primates, family Hominidae, genus Homo, species sapiens).
In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species where he explained the evolution of life on Earth through natural selection. It ignited a lot of opposition because of its social and religious implications that nature is not static, species are not unchanging parts of an already designed hierarchy, and man is not the center of the universe and is related to other animals. We are an integral part of nature with apes as our closest relatives – and therefore not that special.
Photo credit: “The Blue Marble”, taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. The original photograph was taken with the South Pole facing the top, however this version is the most widely distributed.
In the 1960s scientists started to worry about the possible consequences of the rapid growth of population, production, consumption, and pollution and wondered how this would all play out in the future. In 1972 the first picture of the entire Earth was taken from space on an Apollo mission (the famous “Blue Marble” photo), making us aware of the fragility of our small planet in a vast, largely empty universe. The same year the Club of Rome published its analysis of the predicament of mankind – its “Limits to Growth” report (LtG).
Material consumption cannot grow forever on a finite planet
Limits to Growth (LtG) had a simple message: Material consumption cannot grow forever on a finite planet. If we overuse resources we will cross boundaries and go into overshoot. Once we are in overshoot we can come back into sustainable space either through managed or forced decline.
To sum these various strands up: We are not the center of the universe, we are not unique amongst all living beings, and we live on a small, finite planet that provides boundaries for our behavior, our wishes and desires and our material consumption.
The LtG team analyzed many scenarios. Most of them, but not all of them, led quickly to decline. The authors of LtG did not foresee though the rapid technological developments that led to new discoveries of resources and very efficient and cheap ways of extraction. However, this did not change the principle itself; it just changed the timeline – and as it might turn out – only to a marginal degree.
LtG was about scenarios, not about predictions and the LtG team was convinced that they showed ways for humanity to live prosperously on a rich planet forever. However, humanity was on a crossroads and it chose the wrong direction (see footnotes [1]).
What made LtG so different was that the modeling approach boiled down the complexity into 5 essential parameters and considered the feedback loops between these parameters (see footnotes [2]).
This was 50 years ago, and we still are glued to GDP growth figures, measuring the growth of goods and services, assuming that this measures societal success.
Photo credit: Kammeran Gonzalez-Keola
Rewilding: a systemic solution to a systemic crisis
But a new thinking is taking hold. It is the understanding that humanity has created a systemic crisis (or challenge if you wish) and that approaches and solutions also need to be systemic. Silo-thinking cannot solve this systemic crisis.
Rewilding is just such a holistic approach, the kind of approach that we need to overcome the systemic crisis we have created. Rewilding aims to regain natural richness and with it ecosystem resilience, stability, diversity, beauty. Rewilding is about preserving and strengthening the ecosystem services that humanity’s wellbeing and prosperity depend on.
Rewilding is a message of hope, but that does not mean that we should ignore the elephant that is still in the room: The current theory and practice of economy with essentially exponential material growth as the key driver is still the main cause of resource overexploitation, overconsumption and destruction of nature and all that it can give us. We have to remain aware of the fact that, in the end, we need to change the root causes of biodiversity decline, climate change – and inequality.
Photo credit: Antony Trivet
Going towards a fundamental change
As long as humanity measures its progress in the growth of material goods it will neutralize positive achievements and further erode our natural base. Cars now need a third of the petrol they used to burn decades ago, but this increase in efficiency is outweighed by the growing number of cars and their increasing size. There is not one industry that does not try to persuade each one of us to buy and consume more of their products.
What can we, the rewilding community, do about it? We do not have a magic wand, but we can do a lot and it depends on the way we see, communicate, and talk about rewilding.
It is about the set of benefits that intact ecosystems provide, as exploitation focuses on radical extraction of single commodities. And it is primarily about the benefit for the community, also the Earth community, and not primarily about the financial benefit of individuals. By understanding the complex impacts that functioning nature has for human society, by highlighting its economic and financial relevance and by translating the comeback of nature and the increased resilience and stability for human society into a powerful pragmatic as well as inspiring vision we can contribute to the meta-development of solving our challenges at the roots.
By doing so we should however not forget or shy away from identifying the root causes of the problems we are trying to address – the growth of material consumption as indicator of human and planetary wellbeing and progress – just because we believe it harms our positive message or there is nothing that can be done about it.
Footnotes: further detail
[1] The reaction by the “growth community” was fierce. First “there are no limits to growth”, then “well there are limits, but they are far away”, then “well they are not that far away but there is nothing that we can do”.
A number of persistent lies were spread like “The Club of Rome predicted that by the Year 2000 we will run out of oil” etc. – which was never said, nowhere to be found in LtG, but still a lie that persists to this day.
[2] There have been a number of attempts to test the validity of LtG’s model and findings with real life data. They all show that we are following quite exactly what LtG termed the Business As Usual (BAU scenario), which will lead into a sudden decline, probably sometime within the next couple of decades. Reason: Continuous growth of material exploitation and consumption on a finite planet is not possible.